How to Get “Suddenly Old”
What really, truly ages you swiftly
Sawubona.
Fair warning. This is a long piece about aging with a lot of links. Don’t invest in this if you have no interest in a full, healthy life long before you ever step up to your 90th birthday cake. If you do care, nibble at this at your leisure. I hope you enjoy the journey.
Today I read yet another Medium article by a person turning fifty. I’m not going to link to it for I don’t wish to have anyone feel that I’m criticizing them or their point of view. I’m not. I am, however, troubled by the choice of wording, the language used, as in “suddenly old” at fifty.
As though a number, any number at any point of life, by virtue of that number, delivers decrepitude. Over the course of my 67 years I have watched that number slide lower and lower and lower. At one point, elderly used to refer to those in their eighties or nineties. A short while ago, some wag who has money to make from causing us to be terrified, shifted elderly to mean anyone over 65. The pandemic has caused my own previous ( I moved) governor, Jared Polis, to intone that those over 60 are “vulnerable,” in the healthiest state in the nation, full to the brim with senior athletes, senior Olympians and folks who leave their 30-ish compatriots in the dust.
As have I on more than one occasion, hiking mountains all over the world.
Now that age has apparently skidded back another decade, to fifty.
Dear god people, why do we buy into this bullshit?
Well, all due respect to that writer, they do not speak for me, nor my friends, nor my increasing circle of active, engaged, healthy, opinionated, smart, successful (on their terms, not necessarily society’s terms) friends. Most are well past fifty, some are much older. None considers themselves old. None considers themselves elderly, although society would term them that, which is tantamount to a death sentence. It IS a death sentence in this country.
They aren’t vulnerable in any sense of the world, but for how society treats them past a certain age. Especially when folks see the pandemic as a way to clear out all those old folks. Really? Honestly?
I have a message for you: wait a while. Wait until you hit a Certain Age, feel terrific, have taken care of yourself, have endless energy and joie de vivre. Then suddenly every asshole in America from your new doctor to your new friends are trying to stuff you bodily into the old age/vulnerable/elderly/decrepit/ancient/useless box.
My Medium peep Lisa Wathen referenced this recently when she discussed what her new doctor suggested to her- now that she’s all of fifty. Fifty doesn’t determine our state of being. The individual does. Lisa’s active, busy and engaged. My guess is that her body isn’t exactly falling apart, nor do I think that the assumptions too many in the medical profession make about women and aging are accurate. Sure has been my experience.
Talk about not going gently into that good night. Not on your life, Sparky.
Yeah. Wait a while. It’s the single thing that we all have in common, as current crises call out racism and viciousness. Ageism strikes us all, and makes us all equals.
You’re old. The one accusation which, barring early death, is going to slap every single one of us in the face.
Is there any wonder at all that younger people today have a fear of aging when we by our example use negative language to discuss aging? It is a natural process to have things like eyesight change or diminish, go grey (which can happen at any age) to lose some of our sharper faculties. However, far more a factor in our quality of life, far more a factor in terms of how we are able to embrace each day, is our attitude about aging, which is increasingly affected by media. Media with a vested interest in our terror of turning thirty.
My generation didn’t trust anyone over thirty. However, 37 years ago, age and decrepitude weren’t the issues.
We feared the arteriosclerosis of a youthful attitude.
Age doesn’t age us anywhere near as swiftly as our choices. While there are some things we can’t control, like the passage of time, accidents, genetics and some moron who has Covid and doesn’t wear a mask, our aging process is about 70% squarely in our hands. OUR control, not that of popular media or of medicine. If anything, in this regard, the medical community is for me nearly a sworn enemy, but for those few who speak my language of health and prevention, exercise and proper food for fueling the body, and NO pharmaceuticals unless absolutely necessary.
(Please note: I am well aware that poverty, access to health care, race, availability of decent food and many other critical factors come into play; this article doesn’t seek to address that. That’s a whole other piece. Stay with me here.)
These are how we age far too fast:
We age ourselves swiftly by what we eat, how we eat, and our sedentary habits. We age through causing constant inflammation in our bodies. Please see:
This past week I had an excellent opportunity to test the inflammatory foods hypothesis. I had three pieces of cheese and pepperoni pizza. I was sick for three days, my guts in an uproar, my energy flattened and my strength diminished. I don’t need further proof.
Want more about why inflammation is so very important? Please see:
We age ourselves swiftly through extreme dieting, including strict vegans who don’t adequately supplement with Vitamin B12.
Please see:
From that article:
Early, mild symptoms of stage 4 vitamin B12 deficiency include:
- Fatigue
- Depression
- Anxiety
- Loss of appetite
- Pallor
- Hair loss
- Numbness or tingling in the hands and feettPoor memory.
Kindly, all typically attributed to aging. No.
This is caused by diet. Food is medicine is food. The right foods, by definition not the average American diet.
In other words, many of the diets we engage in to lose weight, or to demonstrate our moral superiority are actually killing us off. I hold my hand high here, having been anorexic/bulimic for forty years, nearly starving myself to death, suffering a heart attack. Talk about aging fast.
Please note: if you are overweight (by your body standards, not by Vogue’s), are diabetic and on metformin, you have another issue that needs to be addressed. Metformin has been shown to interfere with the body’s absorption of B12. If you have decided to become a strict vegan on top of being overweight and diabetic, can you not now see how each of these things can combine to create a perfect storm? EVERYTHING interacts. What we choose to ingest or not ingest has an impact.
Instead of running to the doctor for another pill to fix us, may I please suggest that you begin with a serious assessment of your body, your eating habits, get a full panel that tells you what nutrients you may be lacking. So very often what you and I interpret as aging or sickness has far more to with what we’re ingesting, or nutrients we’re not getting through our food choices.
We age ourselves swiftly through bad habits like smoking and drinking.
My hand us up here on the smoking piece. By the time I was nineteen I was up to five packs a day. You read that right. I quit cold turkey and started jogging the same day. Hurt like a sonofabitch. Thought I’d cough my lungs out. Next day I did it again. And the next. And the next. Never looked back, never smoked again, and completely reversed what I had done to my lungs.
Smoking ages your skin and face at warp speed. Please see:
Drinking ages us swiftly, too. Let’s start with skin:
And that’s the tip of the iceberg:
You can moderate the effects by drinking water or juice in between your tonics.The honest truth is that no alcohol is the only good alcohol, other than to get potential virus sheds off your skin. I realize that is a useless approach in today’s world, but it’s also one reason why my face hasn’t aged the way my parents’ faces did. They were lifelong, serious drinkers, as was my brother. By the time he got to his fifties, he looked seventy-five.
No amount of legislation or research will change the fact that alcohol is here to stay. However, how you drink, how much and how often all have much to do with how fast you age.
We age ourselves swiftly through brutally extreme exercise regimens in the very effort to fight off age.
Please see:
From the article: Endurance sports such as ultra marathon running or professional cycling have been associated with as much as a 5-fold increase in the prevalence of atrial fibrillation.
In other words, extreme endurance training does the complete opposite of what you want it to do. It can kill you young by aging your heart, not making it stronger.
Please also see this:
We age ourselves swiftly through taking prescriptions and over the counter (OTC) meds which have horrible interactions, dangerous side effects, and turn people into doddering ancients, causing us to fall and suffer traumatic brain injuries, among other things.
Not because of a number.
Because of drug abuse. Sanctioned drug abuse which feeds a for-profit medical community which only benefits if we are ill. There is no such thing as an American health system. Only the American Industrial Illness Conglomerate. Shareholders lose if we thrive. They make money on our misery.
Polypharmacy results in symptoms that look like age, but aren’t. In many cases they’re side effects, results of drug interactions or overdoses.
Please see:
and this:
Need I point out that any overuse of any drug at any age is going to cause you issues? These are not the problems of the older. They are the problems of people, period. Including very young people, whose obesity causes diabetes, which is an inflammatory disease.
Inflammation ages us.
We age more swiftly through air pollution.
Please see:
From the article:
Air pollution in urban areas, much of which comes from traffic, includes tiny particles called PMs, nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and chemicals such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). “What is very clear is that PMs are a problem for skin,” said Krutmann, whose work has shown PMs increase age spots and wrinkles.
Air pollution has also been linked to diabetes.
Please see this:
Anxiety ages us swiftly.
Not only do we age from anxiety itself, but anxiety causes us to eat badly, smoke, avoid exercise, take drugs, and engage in all the habits that cause inflammation, which increases our anxiety.
We age far more swiftly if we are lonely. Loneliness is not limited to being old. It’s affecting more of us all the time, younger and younger.
Please see:
Our fear that we aren’t worthy, aren’t enough if we aren’t young, perfect, thin, white, rich, or whatever the lie may be causes far more age-inducing anxiety that necessary.
On top of all that, and this would be fucking hilarious if it weren’t such a growing thing, we have a real issue with gerascophobia, which is fear of aging itself. THAT causes anxiety, which leads folks to drink, smoke, take drugs, do stupid shit….
all of which ages them ever so much faster.
From the article:
High levels of anxiety might really make you age faster, a new study suggests.
The study found a link between a common form of anxiety called phobic anxiety — an unreasonable fear of certain situations, such as crowds, heights or the outside world — and shorter telomeres in middle-aged and older women. Telomeres are caps on the ends of chromosomes that protect the genetic material from damage.
What we ingest, what we smoke, the drugs we take, the habits we engage in which cause inflammation all age us far more swiftly than age itself.
It is an easy argument to make, and a hard one to impose, that if more of us ate better, moved more, drank less or not at all, didn’t take drugs or otherwise treated our bodies with a modicum of respect, we wouldn’t be aging so fast.
However, you can-and should- also make the argument that a poor healthcare system, food deserts, grinding poverty, terrible anxiety (as a result of Existing While Black, Hispanic, etc.) lack of education, access to decent housing and intense pressure from corporate marketing to EAT THIS EAT THAT and the cheap availability of poisonous food make health damned hard indeed.
Add to that the current move towards dismantling any and all environmental progress to clean up our air, our water, our oceans and food sources. Especially toxic Superfund sites where the marginalized are forced to live. But that’s another issue.
Finally, in a sincere effort to counter those arguments that people make when I write about those things that you and I can affect, I offer this thoughtful and sobering piece by Joseph Davis. I agree wholeheartedly that the emphasis on anti-aging, the focus on how we should defeat age as though such a thing were possible, the argument that age is a disease to be treated like cancer are not only ridiculous, but hopeless. Sells a lot of stupid shit, but it’s hopeless. You do not stop time. You cannot stop the aging process.
My simple argument is that through our own choices, our own actions, we are aging ourselves far faster than necessary. We are buying the bullshit that we are old at fifty when we are extending our life expectancy. How is that a good thing when we hate who we are at thirty? When many of us still have six more decades or more ahead of us?
Let’s wait, please, for our turn to get elderly. It will come soon enough. You and I are forever in training for our eighties and beyond. When we get there, I hope that the experience is a rich one.
Please see:
My strenuous argument is now and always has been that we might wish to do our level best to improve our quality of life as we age, do all we can to eat well, move much, love even more and have a purpose. Those four stool legs form our foundation.
Age hate does none of us any good. Age fear does us no good at all. We will diminish. We will die. How we get there is very much up to us. In twenty years when I am facing 90, my dear hope is that I don’t focus on exercise for its own sake, but to improve the quality of my days. That I don’t focus on food to stay slim, but to improve the functions of my aging body, which what I understand fellow Illumination writer Helen Cassidy Page to be doing when she practices her planks. That I increasingly enjoy the lack of societal competition and comparison. That I take even greater pleasure than I do now in the rising starlight of the end of my many days, days lived in the best health possible, loved by people I love in return, and the gratitude for the time I’ve been given.
As the No Country article above notes, the gift of wisdom has far more to offer me than any great musculature or fad diet. At some point, the care we’ve taken of our hearts, our bodies and our souls allow us to enter our final years with fewer pains, diseases and the insults that great age can carry, but don’t always have to. Better care of ourselves today far better ensures an easier aging process when we do indeed become elderly.
From the article:
The social orientation of the evening of life need not be individualistic, but toward family and the localization and strengthening of social relations. Similarly, the view of the life cycle need not take its bearings from youth and middle age but from roles and identities appropriate to old age, with their own norms and rewards. These norms and rewards need not be defined in terms of active striving and productivity, but in terms of release, such as from social climbing, and a more contemplative attitude toward the world. Surely, in the last stage of life, health and longevity need not continue to be treated as ends in themselves. Rather, they might be set within a larger framework of limits, a recognition of our vulnerability and dependence, and the ethic of a well-lived life. There are other possibilities, and if we are to free ourselves from the iron cage to which our cultural logic consigns us, we must look to them for direction.
Precisely. When it’s time.